Donation payouts

Donations are paid out weekly, into the same bank account as your raffle proceeds. Everything that has settled since the last payment goes out together as one payment.

You receive the gifts in full. No fee is deducted. If a donor chose to add a bit on top to cover card processing, that part goes to RaffleLink and never forms part of your payment. If they declined, RaffleLink absorbs the cost and your payment is exactly the same.

Donations arrive as their own payment

If you run raffles too, you'll see two separate credits in your bank account rather than one combined amount, each with its own reference. Donations use a reference in this form:

RL Donate 26-0002

This is deliberate, and it's there to make your bookkeeping honest. Donation income and raffle proceeds are different things: one is a gift with no fee, the other is ticket revenue with a platform fee deducted. Landing them as one lump would force whoever does your books to unpick them.

The Payouts tab

Donations → Payouts lists every donation payment. Each row shows:

• Reference — quoted on your remittance email and against each gift in the Donations tab.
• Paid — the date it went out. A payment created by the weekly run and not yet sent shows as waiting.
• Status — Scheduled, Processing, Paid, On hold, or Failed.
• Gifts — how many donations made up the payment.
• Amount paid — the full value of those gifts.
• Donor-paid processing — what donors added on top, shown separately because it went to RaffleLink, not to you. A dash means no donor on that payment covered it.
• Paid to — the last four digits of the account it went to.

Two actions on each row:

• View gifts jumps to the Donations tab filtered to that payment, so you can see exactly which gifts made it up. A banner tells you the filter is on; clear it to go back to the full list.
• Statement downloads an itemised PDF.

The statement is a remittance advice, not a tax invoice

Worth being precise about, because it trips people up at tax time.

RaffleLink issues you a tax invoice for a raffle payout because there's a fee: a service was supplied and you paid for it. On donations there is no fee, so there's no supply to invoice, and no tax invoice is issued.

The statement fills that gap. It itemises every gift in the payment so you can reconcile the deposit against your records and hand something to your treasurer. It just isn't a tax invoice, and shouldn't be filed as one.

If a payment is on hold

Donation payments follow the same rules as raffle payouts. The usual reason for a hold is an unverified bank account, and it clears itself once the account is confirmed. See Verify your payout account.

Refunds and paid-out gifts

A gift can only be refunded while it's still waiting to be paid out. After that the money is with you, and a return is arranged directly with the donor. See Receipts and refunds.